The real question plaguing me about H5 is whether 343 will bring back an arena shooter or a class-based shooter.
There seems to be an awful lot of discussion about the arena shooter being ‘dead’ or a dinosaur. Maybe people think it’s too simplistic a concept, but I don’t get it. Sometimes simplicity is better. The simplicity is what brought me back over and over again to H3. (That and double kill/triple kill/overkill extermination.)
Maybe it’s the money. There seems to be some sort of ultimate quest to squeeze every dime one can out of a gamer, whether it’s a yearly subscription fee or DLCs every 1-2 months. The result is the World of Warcraft subscription model, where you have to rank up to get this or that and the concept is that it will keep people around paying for extras. And yet Halo 3, which IMO was the peak of Halo, had hundreds of thousands of players for YEARS. But of course H3 didn’t make as much money because it didn’t require a map pack every five minutes and after some time you’d actually get the old map packs for free. What a crazy concept to not shake down a fan of your game!
I honestly don’t think CoD killed Halo (maybe greed did). I think they are/were two different game types, and the players expected an arena shooter and got a class-based shooter, and that combined with other regressions in the game they got manhandled by the CoD release.
The other thing that’s tragic is that it’s some function of software nowadays that everything has to be overly complex. How about removing some functionality? Why is that a bad thing? Is it because you’ll have to layoff the guy who codes armor abilities and he’s your friend so you include it in the next version? Seriously, what is it?
I don’t know ultimately what will come of it but personally I hope H5 is an arena shooter again. I hope the AAs go away, I hope the loadouts go away, I hope the drops go away, I hope sprint is fixed or removed. I hope the netcode is substantially better.
Keep the skins, but we don’t need 400 options to start the game with. We don’t need friggin SAWs. We just need some good maps and our own skills at moving, jumping, shooting, and communicating.
I think if there was enough of a market and demand for a straight up arena shooter, such a game would already exist. While I don’t think the lack of such is evidence to the contrary, I do believe it hints to the magnitude and size of the populous that wants it.
> I think if there was enough of a market and demand for a straight up arena shooter, such a game would already exist. While I don’t think the lack of such is evidence to the contrary, I do believe it hints to the magnitude and size of the populous that wants it.
Well, someone will eventually attempt to re-create the market. All it would really take is one well made game that caters to both the Competitive fanbase and the Casual fanbase (yes I realise there are more than that, but this is a games fanbase in its simplest forms) with exciting and addicting gameplay to bring the genre back.
That’s just a guess though. They could either be a huge success or a terrible failure due to lack of market. Only time will tell, because someone is bound to try eventually.
> I think if there was enough of a market and demand for a straight up arena shooter, such a game would already exist. While I don’t think the lack of such is evidence to the contrary, I do believe it hints to the magnitude and size of the populous that wants it.
You might be right. I don’t think you’re right, I kind of hope you aren’t.
Hopefully the previous arcade shooter comment was more of a joke, I don’t think the game concept is outdated in the way that arcades or newspapers are outdated. Consider that people still play RTSes like Starcraft or MMORPGs which have FPS elements. I don’t think arena shooters are dead, I just think they have been co-opted (maybe corrupted is the better term) by the class-based shooters.
Consider that chess is a game that has been around for 1500 years and tons of people still play it. I like to think of a solid Halo game as having extra dimensions like any other mental game like poker and chess, the only real difference being the artwork and of course the twitchy physical aspects.
My guess is that if H5 falls flat as I’m unfortunately currently expecting it to, the genre will have to be revived by the introduction of some future game.
In the end people still play old-school games like Quake UT or counter-strike, they are just more underground. (I’m back to H3 for now, although I’ve been meaning to continue Bioshock.)
> I think if there was enough of a market and demand for a straight up arena shooter, such a game would already exist. While I don’t think the lack of such is evidence to the contrary, I do believe it hints to the magnitude and size of the populous that wants it.
So do we think that the market evaporated since 2007? Halo 3 still has the highest sales for the franchise and was the most populated Halo multiplayer on the current generation of consoles.
> > I think if there was enough of a market and demand for a straight up arena shooter, such a game would already exist. While I don’t think the lack of such is evidence to the contrary, I do believe it hints to the magnitude and size of the populous that wants it.
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> So do we think that the market evaporated since 2007? Halo 3 still has the highest sales for the franchise and was the most populated Halo multiplayer on the current generation of consoles.
Evaporated? Not exactly, but it has changed drastically. There’s no denying the landscape of FPS markets has shifted. The target audience is a shifting target. People grow up, tastes change. I have no doubt that a straight up arena shooter still has a niche audience, but it will never be like what it was back in 2007.
What bands were popular in 2007? Why aren’t they just as popular today? Know what I mean? It’s not 2007 anymore. Times change. It’s the ability to change and what those changes are, that will dictate the relevance and success that any franchise has in the future. Failure to do so, or do so poorly, is a recipe that guarantees obsolescence. So in essence, it’s not change for change sake, but change in a way that maintains the core audience and attracts the next generation of gamer. Without interest from the newer, younger gamer, the franchise will fizzle. It’s a tricky problem. Everyone has an opinion on it, but no one can say with 100% certainty what changes will ensure success and achieve the aforementioned. I think with any legacy product, these are the prevalent challenges.
Unreal Tournament is an Arena Shooter with classes. There’s a mutator (option) that can be turned on to force everyone to have the same stats if preferred (usually for tournaments, URT3 was inverted, mutate to turn on attributes) but make no mistake, Unreal is a Classed-based Arena Shooter.
Sure one can make a “class” with their loadouts in Halo but the most you’ve going to diversify in standard gaming is CQB, medium or long range and that’s not really a class.
Of course in Reach I made custom Invasion loadouts that one would consider classes because I was able to force PW’s.
I could have an engineer or EOD by having a shotgun and rockets (and AL).
I could have a sniper with a SniRi and DMR (and jetpack).
I could have a scout with a shotgun, DMR and active camo.
I could have a medic with a sword, AR and regen shield.
Now for Halo5, I’d prefer things like H4 but the majority of gametypes to work the way the Team Slayer gametype now works.
In other words we don’t have classes, we have personal loadouts.
For non-custom loadout gametypes: Pro is the pre-determined precision loadout giver and Legendary is for completely symmetrical starts of the weapon named in the title.
I am very, very content with these options for any and all gametypes (just as I did Unreal with its mutator to toggle unique character/race attributes).
Honestly I just don’t see the analogy you are drawing with bands and games. Video game technology will certainly shift eventually, maybe to 3D or virtual games, and yes people who play Pac Man or side scrollers are now a niche, but arena shooters are not boring to me in any way, in the same way as I said people still play RTSes or FPS games. The art has stayed mostly the same. When I was playing H3 I could literally play for 16 hours straight and still find myself enjoying the experience. With H4 it takes less than half an hour for me to rage quit (not because it’s class-based vs arena-based but mostly because the lag is terrible due to whatever force is at work - and my connection is really not that bad).
Anyway, getting off the subject. The most popular mobile game, angry birds, has been around in one form or another for over 20 years. I used to play similar games on the early macs.
As I said the only thing I really agree with as far as the band analogy is that people in our current era seem to prefer increasingly simple crap that doesn’t require skill and is popular because some marketing officer found a way to shove unwarranted hype down your throat.
To be honest, I’m really looking forward to Halo 3 going free on xbox live. I think you are going to see at the very least a fun couple of weeks as a six year old game makes a fun resurgence.
That’s the thing though. There are popular bands that sound much like hte ones in 2007. The specific bands (Halo 3) wrote the music they had to write. Then a new band with a very similar sound comes out a few years later and recaptures the magic. HALO 5!
> I think if there was enough of a market and demand for a straight up arena shooter, such a game would already exist. While I don’t think the lack of such is evidence to the contrary, I do believe it hints to the magnitude and size of the populous that wants it.
Logical fallacy. You can use that same logic to claim “There can’t be life elsewhere in the universe, because if there was they would have found us by now”
There is not many arena shooters in the market right now because Halo which used to be an arena shooter cornered that market, no one else tried making one because they simply couldn’t compete with Halo.
Also it seems obvious people DO want an arena shooter back, just look at population numbers and sales. Halo has lost its juggernaut monopoly on the FPS market after Halo 3 with Reach and Halo 4, the same time when Halo jumped the shark going from arena shooter to pseudo class based shooter. If people truly loved class based shooting in Halo then why is Halo 4 not getting the population Halo 3 had?
Many players (myself included) like the customizability that class-based shooters can offer. You have to admit, being able to tailor your loadouts to your liking then test them out on the battlefield against other players has a lot of appeal. This isn’t the route Halo needs to take though; it has its roots as an arena shooter and it should stay that way.
CoD is not a class based shooter. It is a game that allows you to choose what you spawn with. Class based shooters are games like Team Fortress 2 or Battlefield. A class based shooter is based on distinct roles of players. For example the medic in TF2 heals the team to build up an UberCharge that provides temporary invincibility to him and a teammate. In the same game the Engineer can place a turret, teleporters. and dispensers that dispense health and ammo. A pyro is a class that focuses on up close burning of enemies. As you can see each class has distinct role. CoD and Halo do not have that type of design. They allow you to choose your weapons, grenades, and perks (which need to removed from Halo btw). That is not the same thing. Halo is still an arena shooter albeit one with modern fps systems like load outs.
The market certainly has shifted, but without the consent of hundreds of thousands of halo fans.
The lack of popularity in Reach and even less in H4 is directly linked to the lack of the H2/H3 based arena shooter style. Argue it all day long thats the only way I see it.
The day Halo gets back to its competitive arena roots, the massive populous will return. The more it evolves into a class based mess, see current population.
The inclusion of classes doesn’t define a shooter’s sub-genre. I think the most prominent defining feature of are shooters is the movement oriented gameplay. If we consider Quake as the baseline for arena shooters (which it is), games like the Unreal Tournament series and Team Fortress, despite their classes (loadouts for UT), are much more reminiscent of that than Halo has ever been. Whether the inclusion of classes is good or bad for Halo, it doesn’t make it any less of an arena shooter than it has ever been.
If you use the arena/class based shooter divide, you don’t really understand the different sub-genres of first person shooters. Halo is not class based. Call of Duty – not class based. The proper division is its own discussion, but the arena/class based division has multiple examples that contradict it, and is therefore an invalid way to divide the sub-genres.
When it comes to the decrase of the popularity of Halo, it’s fine by me for anyone to believe whatever they want. Popularity does not make a game. We can debate all day about why we think Halo has become less popular, but in the end of the day, it’s only a weak attempt to justify the gameplay style we like from a financial perspective. Which we ultimately can say nothing about because we are trapped to our own perspectives with insufficient amounts of data to make objective observations.
I don’t need seven million people to tell me why I don’t like Halo 4. Neither do I care do those people dislike Halo 4 for the same reasons as I do or do they have whole another reasons to dislike it. Ultimately, it’d be naive of me to think that all of them agree with me on what’s wrong with Halo 4.
> Popularity does not make a game. We can debate all day about why we think Halo has become less popular, but in the end of the day, it’s only a weak attempt to justify the gameplay style we like from a financial perspective.
Except in this case popularity DOES make the game. The lasting draw to the game for many people is the multiplayer which requires a stable population to provide a good experience.
So its not just an exercise in self justification.
> > Popularity does not make a game. We can debate all day about why we think Halo has become less popular, but in the end of the day, it’s only a weak attempt to justify the gameplay style we like from a financial perspective.
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> Except in this case popularity DOES make the game. The lasting draw to the game for many people is the multiplayer which requires a stable population to provide a good experience.
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> So its not just an exercise in self justification.
The Halo 4 population is stable, what you want is a sufficient population to provide optimal matchmaking quality. It’s a valid point, but the population argument is still what it is. Everyone agrees that popularity is a nice thing. People use that to justify their viewpoints by saying that following their preferences will make the game more popular.
But as I said, it’s something where people take insufficient data and see what they want to see in that data. Then they take that data and make a twisted interpretation to justify their position.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I think population is utterly pointless. I just have a strong opinion on the productivity of the debate.
You’re right that the word that I should have used was sufficient.
You’re wrong that the population is stable. Its in equilibrium, but its unstable equilibrium. its teetering on the edge of a knife. It doesn’t have to drop much further for the experience to be completely untenable in the majority of play lists.
I’m basing this off of what happened to Halo 3 and Halo Reach when the population started sagging AFTER the next title came. There is a breaking point. We’re close to it.
